Saturday, 21 January 2017

Crowd Help Needed to Visualise Campaign for People's Classics

Dr Holmes-Henderson

Wonderful news arrived yesterday at exactly
the right time to dispel gloom. I've
been awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts & Humanities Research
Council to run a nationwide campaign. It will support Classical Civilisation or
Ancient History qualifications in secondary education. But I need your help
and there is a £100 prize on
offer!

Studying ancient Greek and Roman Roman
civilisation, history, thought, literature, art and archaeology is not only
exciting and instructive, but confers profound advantages: it hones analytical
and critical skills, trains minds in the comparative use of different types of
evidence, introduces young people to the finest oratory and skills in
argumentation and communication, enhances cultural literacy, refines
consciousness of cultural difference and relativism, fosters awareness of a
three-millennia long past, along with models and ideals of democracy, and
develops identities founded in citizenship on the national, European and
cosmopolitan, global level. So there.

But our project needs a promotional
image and logo before we design the website. The full title is cumbersome: ‘Teaching
Classical Civilisation in Britain: Recording the Past and Fostering the Future’. We need to identify—or persuade one of our
friends out there such as you, your children or pupils to create—an
impact-making, easily reproducible pic and/or logo that gets over one or more of the key
themes: youth, education, classics, inspiration.

So I’m offering £100 to the best
suggestion or submission, sent in by the March 1st deadline. Everyone is eligible but tell me your age if you like. I have thought
about such themes as the autodidacts’ Minerva urging youths to education, about
Cheiron the Centaur who taught mythical heroes in their teens, ancient images
of young people studying, or more British subject-matter (Boudicca, well-known
British artists). But I am old and out of touch with people born since the
millennium and they are the ones we want to
get involved.

Please email or post ideas to me at my
two names divided by a dot then @kcl.ac.uk, Dept. of Classics, King’s College,
Strand, London WC2R 2LS. Arlene and I will announce the winning submission on 4th
March. And meanwhile I can’t resist posting this upcheering pic of the two teenagers I am
most proud of in the world, off today to march against misogyny.

[*] In Swansea,
Exeter, Warwick, Kent, Durham, Glasgow, St Andrews, Belfast, Liverpool, Open University,
Leeds and Reading. Information about whom to contact at each partner institution will be available soon.